


Flying Horses

by Tierfal



Series: Merry-Go-Rounds [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Adopted Children, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Dates, First Meetings, Fluff, Kid Fic, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-05 22:09:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4196790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The carousel attendant puts a hell of a twist into Roy's and Elysia's serene little Saturday routine – but Roy Mustang isn't likely to strike on happiness until barnyard animals take to the summer skies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Soooooooo about twelve years ago, it was [Silver](hawkeline.tumblr.com)'s birthday, and I was like, "Hey, an excuse to write one of my irrepressible kidfic plotbunnies!", because for some reason Roy adopting Elysia after the Hugheses die in a horrible accident is, like, my _jam_. I am messed up. It's true. :'D And turns out it works great for the _AU_ prompt for [Roy/Ed Week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com)! ♥
> 
> ANYWAY, the park depicted in this fic is about a mile away from my apartment, so I can always hear the train whistle when I take a shower on the weekends, and it sorta got away from me from there. I mean that. The majority of this is utterly superfluous marshmallow fluff. XD Buuuuuut I hope my cinnamon roll Silver gets a smile out of it, in any case! ♥
> 
> Please be warned that:  
> \- there is another 16K of this shit that I'll try to post this weekend  
> \- you should brush your goddamn teeth after consuming  
> \- you will find periodic PG-13 language and themes herein

It’s overcast, and the chill in the air has kept most of the local families inside—which suits Roy just fine; it means there’s no line at the carousel.  He’d be riding fairly high even if they’d arrived to a horrendous crowd, however; the swimming classes after school are having their intended effect of obliterating Elysia’s energy reserves, and she slept in until a record-breaking nine fifteen this morning.  In addition, he was able to explain to her that UV light can’t be stopped by something so flimsy as a couple of clouds, and she let him slather her face in sunscreen with a minimum of nose-wrinkling, which makes this Saturday altogether something of a coup.

There’s no one waiting between the wrought-iron partitions where the line for the carousel usually forms, although the carousel itself is running, serenading them with the brassy circus tones; even with today’s dim weather, the mirrors and the brightly-polished paint catch sparks of sunlight.

Elysia only has eyes for the shifting horses.  Roy wishes he could say the same—there’s no telling if today’s attendant of the ride is even legal, let alone receptive to the greedy eyes of weary thirty-something single fathers with no time to do anything more than look.

But it’s hardly his fault, is it, when the kid’s got bright gold hair swept up into a long ponytail that trails down from the back of his logo baseball cap; when his eyes are too honeyed to be called _brown_ ; when he somehow makes scuffed black jeans and the employee polo look like runway fodder—like a tease, a _torment_ , for hiding the graceful angles of his body underneath?

It’s hardly his fault when the kid flashes a huge grin at Elysia and crouches down to hold out his hand for her ticket, and Roy can’t pretend to ignore him.

“You know which horse you want?” the kid asks.

Elysia nods vigorously, then fixes her eyes on the spinning ride; her favorite comes rolling into view, and she points with straight-armed, sharp-fingered certainty.

“Good choice!” the kid says of the horse carved with medieval armor, accented with red silk and plumes of black feathers.  “That one’s my favorite.  What do you think its name is?”

Elysia eyes him for another moment.  Her face relaxes visibly as she deems him worthy of her trust—he has good taste in carousel horses, after all.

“Cassandra,” she says.  “But she goes by Cassie.”

“I always called her Nightshade,” the kid says, “but I really like yours, too.”

Elysia considers the carousel as it slows before them, unfathomable fundaments creaking softly.  “She can have two names.”

The kid grins again.  “Cassie Nightshade,” he says.  “That’s awesome.”

Elysia grins back.

“All right,” the kid says as the carousel shudders to a full and complete stop.  “Hold that thought for just a second.”  He glances up at Roy for the first time and tilts a smile.  “You riding too?  She got the best horse, I dunno if there’s much point.”

Roy smiles, and—it’s extraordinary, the flicker in the gold-flecked eyes, the faint tightening of the muscles in his jaw.  Roy’s used to having an effect on people, but he’s not used to his facial expressions being such an obvious imposition.

That was the _oh shit he’s hot_ look—no mistaking it.  Not after all this time.

It’s a pleasant daydream; he’ll file that one away.

“We can share,” Elysia cuts in.  She grabs Roy’s sleeve.  “We can share, if you want.”

“She’s all yours,” Roy says.  “I’ll watch.  Just promise me you’ll wave when you go by.”

Elysia’s eyes are huge and solemn as she nods again, slowly.  “Promise.”

She looks more like her mother every day, but her mannerisms tend so strongly towards Maes sometimes that it takes Roy’s fucking breath away and leaves an arctic wind in place of it—a glacier in his chest; ice-water in his veins—

“Sounds good,” the kid says brightly, and then he jaunts over and jumps up onto the carousel platform, where he weaves through the stilled horses, rearranging the abandoned belts and patting wooden heads and flanks as he walks by.  When he’s made the circle, he hops down again, returns to the gate, opens it, and gestures grandly.  “You may select your noble steed, my lady,” he says.

Elysia looks starstruck, and Roy can’t exactly blame her.

He tips the kid another smile (and reaps a slightly less strained expression of poorly-stifled, reluctant approbation this time) and follows Elysia over to Cassie Nightshade, where he hovers within arm’s length while she clambers up the bronze steps hanging from the horse’s side and struggles to hike her tiny body over into the seat.  There’s a second when her little pink sneaker starts to slip, and she starts to pitch rightward, and—he’s there, gentle-handed, righting her carefully, and then she clasps her tiny hands around the golden bar and beams at him, and he wonders how it came to this but can’t find much cause for regret.

She holds her arms up while he wraps the soft-worn leather belt around her (is she always going to seem so _small_?  Like a tiny doll, and porcelain’s so fragile, and what if—?) and buckles her in securely, at which point the attendant kid swings by and tugs on his handiwork—either for good measure alone, or because of liability obligations; either way Roy’s rather glad of it, all told.

“Awesome,” the kid says.  “Let’s get this show on the road.”

They step down together, and the kid moves over to the square plastic casing on the wall that covers up the lit buttons that run the ride.  He flips the top back and pushes his thumb into the green one, and the music crescendos, and the gears grind, and the whole beautiful construction starts to turn.

The kid leans back against the wall, shoving his hands in his pockets, and smiles.  Elysia is patting the horse’s mane and talking to it quietly as she swivels out of sight.

“Does she want one for real?” the kid asks.

“At _least_ one,” Roy says.  “She has names picked for half a dozen by now.  We had a talk about how horses are much more difficult to take care of than the cat, and that if she’s still sure she wants to learn to ride in a few more months, she can start helping out with the chores to help us afford the lessons—and _then_ we can think about whether she wants her own someday.”

The kid grins again—a grin like a slice of starlight, like a knife unsheathed, like a breath of undiluted oxygen.  “Nicely done, Dad.”

“Oh,” Roy says.  “Well—”

“ _Uncle Roy_!” Elysia calls, waving madly as she comes back into view.  He waves back, albeit a touch less avidly; he did unspeakable things to his elbow that way once.

The kid is waving at her, too, bless him.  “She doesn’t look like you, but I didn’t want to assume.”

“I’m her godfather,” Roy says.  “Which, let me tell you, doesn’t make adoption any easier, whatever’s in the wills.”

The kid wrinkles his nose.  “Don’t I know it.  Had that with my grandma.  Well, my sorta-grandma.  It was really bad because my dad just fu—screwed off, so he was technically still our guardian to start, only nobody could get a hold of him or anything, and… well.  Yeah.  It was a pain.”  Elysia comes around, waving again, and they raise their arms in perfect unison to reciprocate.  “But—y’know.  Water under the bridge and whatever.”

“Quite,” Roy says.  “A Class 5 whitewater rapid, likely, but—nonetheless.”

The kid laughs—loud and genuinely, from deep in his chest.  “Yeah, you could say that.  But hey, teaches you how to swim.”  He shrugs—a motion so fluid Roy can’t help wondering all sorts of things he shouldn’t.  “It’s all good.  Great thing with my grandma is, because her company’s in her name, working for her isn’t going to look like nepotism on my CV for grad school.”  His face splits into a grin so bright it’s blinding for a second.  “Can’t complain about that.”

Roy gestures to the ambient child-centric chaos.  He has to be sure; he owes that to both of them.  “Summer job, then?”

“Yeah,” the kid says.  “Sort of ended up doing it on accident—my brother and I were here one time over spring break because he had a craving for snow cones, and there was this one little kid who was just sitting on the bench over there crying, and we tried to help him find his mom and stuff, and we went to the office to ask for help, and the guy in charge basically just offered us jobs on the spot.”  He grins again, shrugs again, wraps Roy’s heart up in his fist and squeezes tight.  “Should’ve worn my stupid collegiate shirt that day; maybe I’d be getting more than minimum wage.”

Oh, sweet glorious hallelujah; that’s one less tally mark scraped down the screeching chalkboard beneath the column titled _Go to Hell, Go Directly to Hell, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200_ , and now Roy can admire this kid’s ass in peace.

“He’s off today,” the kid says.  “My brother.  He part-times at the animal shelter, too, so he doesn’t have a whole lot of time left for _these_ animals.”  He jerks his head towards the lawn and, presumably, the kids running amok upon it.

“You’re really good with them,” Roy says, meaning it.  “Or at least with her.”  This round, Elysia is too focused on communicating with Cassie Nightshade to remember to wave.

“I guess so,” the kid says.  “It’s just, like… they’re people.  Kids are people.  I think a lot of grownups forget that and treat them like they’re stupid, which isn’t true at all; they just think about stuff differently.  You just have to take them seriously; that’s all.”  He smiles ruefully.  “Guess you probably know that.”

“It took some figuring out,” Roy says, pushing his hair back from his forehead and then letting it fall as he sighs lightly.  The kid’s bright eyes don’t miss a damn thing; it’s _perfect_.  “I would certainly not say I was cut out for this from the start.”

“I dunno if anybody is,” the kid says.  “I dunno if anybody is at _anything_ , really.  I think mostly you just sort of work it out as you go.”

This is getting a bit profound for a foray into flirty banter.  There is a distinct possibility that the kid does not _realize_ this is a foray into flirty banter, which is why he’s musing on life lessons instead of eyeing the sliver of skin that shows where Roy’s first two shirt buttons are undone.

Then again—then again; then again; the sound of his heartbeat, more or less.  Then again, who is he to assume that anyone, let alone a stunning young thing with a blond ponytail and a grin that could murder a lesser man, must be interested in him?  Statistically speaking, the vast majority of the male population simply isn’t, or at least not enough to be willing to pursue the possibility that he could slide their Kinsey score a little further on the scale with just the pressure of his tongue.

Besides, what’s so wrong with a pleasant conversation for its own sake?  He can fall into those eyes as many times as he likes; he doesn’t have to make a fuss about it.

“I think you’re right about that,” he says, softly.

Fuck it all, _that_ smile—that one, small and sweet and curled up at the edges, gentler than any of its predecessors, ever so slightly asymmetrical on the right side—

…God, it’s been too long since he got laid.  There just isn’t time anymore, not with work and more work and Elysia’s mostly-symbolic-but-still-extremely-time-consuming “homework” and the cooking and the cleaning and the making of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with heart-shaped cookie cutters and the reading aloud of _Narnia_ books and…

It’s a bit stupid to ask when exactly he became a walking caricature of a suburban single father, because he knows precisely when it was, and pinpointing the moment has not alleviated the effects.

“So what do you do?” the kid asks.  Elysia waves this time.  Roy wonders how many revolutions there are per ride; most likely the young man standing next to him could answer down to the fraction of a rotation.  “When you’re not being Model Dad at the park, I mean.”  He flushes hotly.  “I mean—exemplary, although—I guess I wouldn’t—be surprised—if you were a model.”

The plot thickens—as does Roy’s blood, as does his breath, as does the quantity of teeth in his grin.

“I teach political science,” he says.  “At Fairfield.”

He could have—he _would_ have—gone into politics for himself, for the world, for _real_ , instead of applying his acumen to the local community college’s transfer program.  Then again, then again…

For everything else that can be said, for all the vitriol that he’d deserve, for all the wormwood that he’s choked down throughout the years—he never resents a goddamn thing when Elysia lays her head on her rose-pink pillow and goes to sleep content.

“No kidding,” the kid says, looking like he wants to fan at his own cheeks.  “That’s really cool.”

“Where do you go to school?” Roy asks, pretending—with all the utmost angelic innocence that he can muster—that he hasn’t noticed the kid’s current state of systemic vascular distress.

The kid jerks a thumb in a northerly direction.  “Berkeley.  Full ride with work-study.  Pretty sweet.”

“Very,” Roy says.

The carousel is slowing, which is a damn shame—he doesn’t get too many breathers anymore; he can’t afford to set too many minutes aside for selfishness, and with the creaking of the horses and the gleam of the tall twisting poles, this delightful little liaison is drawing to a close.

This isn’t about him—today, weekends, the park, his life now.  This is about the little girl petting the carved curls of her horse’s mane as it shudders to a stop.

Two years ago, he would have tilted his hips, tossed his head, winked broadly, and asked for the honor of a cell number—and he almost certainly would have gotten it.  Then he would have unleashed the precisely-timed barrage of flirty texts varying from excruciatingly coy to downright salacious; and he would have coaxed this lovely creature into his bed one way or another, tagged him, and released him into the wild.

But it isn’t two years ago, and he isn’t that man anymore.  This isn’t about him.  He resists the urge to savor another eyeful of the kid’s exquisite ass, focusing on the little embroidered nametag on his left chest pocket instead.

“Well, Ed,” he says, “nice to meet you.  Thanks.”

Ed doses him with another shot of that devastating sunshine grin.  “Sure thing.  You, too.”

The man he used to be acquired a hell of a lot of practice detecting other people’s eyes on him, and Ed’s don’t leave his back as he climbs up onto the carousel, unbuckles the huge leather belt, and lifts Elysia down.

“What do you want to do next?” he asks.

She gives it a long, solemn moment of thought, standing stock-still in the middle of the field of frozen horses before she makes her choice: “Can you please push me on the swing?”

He holds his hand out, and she wraps all five of her tiny fingers around his thumb.  “You got it, Princess.”

  


* * *

  


There’s much more of a crowd the next weekend, but Roy supposes one can’t win them all.  Come summer, this place is going to metamorphose into a veritable moshpit of sticky children and their haggard accompanying adults—picnic blankets will sprout up like fungal growths in every patch of shade; the playgrounds will swarm with scrambling bodies decorated with scraped knuckles and skinned knees; wailing tears and giddy laughter will echo in stereo from every side.  They probably have a month left of relative peace if the gloomy weather holds.

Apparently famished from the five-hundred-foot trek from the parking lot, Elysia calls a halt the second they hit the lawn so that they can have their unsweetened yogurt and obscenely overpriced organic granola (it’s not that Roy’s one of _Those People_ who throws a hissy fit at the mere mention of high-fructose corn syrup, but… well, why not give her the best of everything for as long as he can?).  When the snack gets boring, she makes him a crown out of the little white-petaled weeds—chattering all the while about how Evan taught her how at recess, and he’s probably her best friend except for Lola, who’s her best friend when it comes to what they like to read, because Evan doesn’t like ponies, which is inconceivable, but she still nobly strives to treat him well despite his faults…

Roy wears his gift with more pride than the fingerpaint stains on his good suits, but slightly less than the beaded bracelet she made with his name on it in arts and crafts.

By the time they reach the ticket kiosk, she’s moved on to discussing how she’s worried about Jack (full name, Jack Sparrow-Slayer—Roy might not have been _entirely_ sober back when he christened the cat, but since the cat in question preceded Elysia moving in, he just took to abbreviating a little) because he’s been doing “something weird” with his tail lately.  Roy is more than a smidgeon embarrassed to admit that his heart pirouettes upon seeing Ed in the wide-open ticket window, offering up yet another iteration of that terrible _grin_.

“Hey, there,” Ed says when they get close.  Blessedly, there’s no one else in line; they get him all to themselves.  Well.  _Roy_ gets him mostly to himself; he doesn’t suppose Elysia is quite as invested in attractive strangers at five as he is thirty years on down the line.  “How’ve you been?”

“Excellent, thank you,” Roy says, and he mostly even means it.  Every day is a grand gift he does his damnedest not to squander.  “You?”

“I’m good,” Ed says.

Roy reaches down, hefts Elysia’s as-yet-fairly-insubstantial weight, and slings her up onto his shoulders with a leg dangling on either side.  She immediately starts adjusting her flower crown opus in his hair.

Ed grins up at her.  “How are you?  Are you back for more time with Cassie?”

Roy can’t contort his neck enough to see her facial expressions from this angle—a knowledge attained through excruciating experience—but he’d bet both hands that she’s nodding solemnly.

“And we’re gonna ride the train,” she says.  “It’s really loud, but Uncle Roy covers my ears for me, so it’s okay.”

“Uncle Roy seems pretty great,” Ed says, and Roy’s heart just about fucking _stops_ when those bright eyes turn to him, and one of them winks.

Elysia pauses, reorients a wayward lock of Roy’s hair, and then says “He is” as if it’s the single most obvious thing in the whole of the world.

Ed’s grin only broadens.  “Guess so, huh?  So that’s one ticket for the carousel, and two for the train?”

Making a child happy for a grand total of six dollars is almost inconceivable these days, which is part of why they’re always here.  “Yes, sir,” Roy says, fishing the cash out of his wallet.

“You want to come on the train with us?” Elysia asks as Ed takes the money.  “You could cover Uncle Roy’s ears.”

A touch of rosy pink dusts Ed’s cheekbones as he fumbles to put the bills in the register.  “Y’know, it’s really nice of you to ask, but—I mean, I gotta work.  Maybe another time.”

The universe is full of wonders in every shape and size, but few quite as extraordinary as the fact that Elysia has not only inherited her father’s meddling matchmaker habits, but begun to exhibit them at the age of _five_.

“Okay,” she says.  Something lifts from Roy’s head, snagging slightly, and he thinks he knows what comes next.  “Do you want this?  Can I give him this, Uncle Roy?  I’ll make you another one.”

Ed’s not wearing the logo baseball cap today, which makes him a prime flower crown target.  Roy would have warned him, but there simply wasn’t time.

“Of course, sweetheart,” he says, giving Ed a _you’re doomed, pal_ sort of a grin.  “Whatever you like.”  He leans down so she can hold it out to offer.

“Heck, yes,” Ed says, making a face back at Roy.  “That’s so awesome—you _made_ it?  I’m gonna wear it all day.  Everyone’ll be jealous—should I send ’em to you if they ask for one?”

Elysia plants it crooked on his head because she’s giggling too hard to keep her hands steady, and Roy thinks he’s going to say something very stupid if they stay here any longer, because Ed is patting it into place and standing up straighter and turning to show his profile and saying, “How do I look?”

“Great!” Elysia says.

And Roy just barely bites his tongue on _Like you could break my heart into a thousand pieces just by drawing breath_.

“I do believe you do it justice,” he says instead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please attribute excruciatingly slow update speeds to the inimitable combination of summer + lack of A/C. :'D

The next weekend, the crowds are thicker still, but Roy’s in high spirits; the semester’s ending, and he’s about to be free to schlep his freelance articles far and wide.  He even budgeted a little better this year, so they have a bit of a cushion to cut into before the situation sinks its teeth into his bank account, and it all gets urgent.  A damn _break_ sounds like a godsend.  Maybe he’ll take Elysia to the beach, and the aquarium, and the zoo.  Maybe she can go to science camp.  Or maybe he’ll hoard all the pennies and save the sum for her next birthday; maybe…

They have their picnic in a spot of shade that looks like a coffee stain, the way the sunlight hits the tree and drapes the shadow over them.  Elysia still smiles every time she sees that he cut her sandwiches into the little hearts—he hopes sincerely that that sheer, raw enthusiasm for existence never fades a _fraction_.  He hopes she’ll always be her father’s child in that regard.

They buy tickets for the carousel, and the train, and Elysia wants to save the best for last, so they line up with the others in between the partitions and wait for the half-sized steam engine to puff down to the turntable and then chug back to latch on to the front of the chain of little cars.  Roy spots a familiar flip of golden ponytail—Ed’s spotting the kid driving the engine, who draws all the way across; Ed drops a safety gate, hauls back on an enormous lever to switch the tracks, and then plants both hands on another pole with a red rubber handle, which rotates the whole platform as he pushes it forward, his sneaker treads fighting for traction on the little metal grate around the edge.

“That’s really cool,” Elysia says.  “What if it’s a bigger train?  Do you think a horse could do it?”

Roy has a hazy premonition of some Golden Age railroad-related History Channel documentaries in their future.  “I’m not sure, but I bet we could find out.”

Elysia nods with all of the solemn sagacity a thoughtful five-year-old can muster.  “Okay.  Where do you want to sit?”

Roy hesitates just a moment too long.

“Hey,” Ed says, jogging up to them, cheeks bright and eyes brighter, as another kid unlocks the gate.  “If you sit in the back one, it’s a little quieter.  Plus I’m on caboose duty, so I can tell you all the secrets.”

Elysia’s eyes widen to improbable dimensions.  “What’re the secrets?”

Ed winks.  “If I told you _now_ , they wouldn’t be secrets anymore.”

Elysia turns her astonishment on Roy.  “Uncle Roy, there’s _secrets_!”

All Roy can think, looking at Ed, is _I’d like to ride_ your _caboose_.

This is what happens when he goes almost two years without getting laid.

“I guess we’ll have to investigate,” he says—smoothly, of course; rusty or not, he’s always been a natural at this game.

Ed grins, and then he steps back to start helping the other employee to shepherd kids and their families towards open seats.  The train cars come about as high as Roy’s elbow, with squarish cutouts for entry and polished wooden slat benches within.  This city has always outdone itself insisting that it’s a small town wreathed in nostalgic tradition, and the tiny steam train in the beautifully-tended park fits that model perfectly—Roy places it directly between the tree-lighting downtown at Christmas and the dogged restoration of the fifties-style storefronts.

“Right this way,” Ed says.  He leads them all the way to the penultimate train car, and Elysia braces one hand on the wall of the car and one on Roy’s outstretched palm and hops over the gap at the edge of the platform.  She’s clambered up onto the seat and settled on her knees for the best view of the outside by the time he’s stepped in to join her.

“It’s quieter back here?” she asks with a touch of suspicion as Ed settles in the final car, perched on a contraption not entirely unlike a booster seat to let him see all the way to the front.  Roy refrains from any commentary even inside his head; he’s seen park employees of a dozen different heights use it in this spot.

“Yeah,” Ed says in answer to Elysia’s question.  “You know how sound works?  It’s about vibrations moving—and the further they travel, the weaker they get, ’cause they have to push through all of the air.  It’s air getting squished that makes sounds—your ear hears the difference between different types of squishing.  So me talking squishes the air one way, and the train whistle does it another.  But the further I am away from you, the further the vibrations have to go, so the harder it’s gonna be to hear me, right?”

“Right,” Elysia says slowly.

“And I bet Uncle Roy’ll cover your ears anyway,” Ed says, grinning at him—doesn’t this count as murder?  At _least_ assault?  “Just in case.”

Elysia looks up at Roy like he’s her savior.  It’s a bitter, _bitter_ thing—these moments where his chest cavity just can’t contain how much it’s possible to adore her; the knowledge that Maes’s heart was ten times bigger than his will ever be, and that man could have loved her with the enormous feats of absolute devotion she deserves.  Roy’s only just learning what the hell it all means—dedication, self-sacrifice, all this crap you’re told about like you’ll have some instinct for it when the need for it arises.  That’s a lie.  He built this.  He built this life, for her, for them; he cultivated all these child-handling skills.  He fought through and figured it out.  None of it made sense right off the bat; no primal fatherhood awoke in him when someone else’s offspring landed in his lap.  Is it different when you see a recombination of your own genes staring back at you?  Does something click?  Or is it always just a matter of working at it, and caring enough to try no matter how hard it gets?

“Of course,” he says.

The acting conductor walks up and down the platform one more time, checking over the motley crew of bouncing toddlers and bored adolescents and beleaguered parents scattered through the cars.

“So,” Ed says to Elysia.  “Tell me about you.  What’s your favorite book?”

“Narnia,” Elysia says instantly.  Then she looks pained.  “Or—Hobbit.  I really like Hobbit.  They made a movie, but it’s scary, so I don’t wanna see.”

Ed looks like he’s won the lottery.  “Hey, that’s one of my favorites, too!  You might not like the movie, though, yeah.  What movies do you like?”

Elysia thinks it over very seriously.

“‘Star Wars’,” she says.  “And ‘The Little Mermaid’.  It’s a tie.”

Ed looks at Roy like he’s the winning ticket.  “Those are real good choices.”

How long has it been since somebody looked at him like that?

Shouldn’t even think it.  No time; no energy; no room in his headspace or his home or his carefully-balanced little life.

“‘Return of the Jedi’ is the best,” Elysia says.  “I like ‘Empire Strikes Back’, too, because of Yoda.  But the part with the wampa is really scary, so I always need somebody to watch it with me.”

“Here we go, sweetheart,” Roy says as the engine starts to growl.  Elysia’s contented expression drops into abject terror for a second until Roy lays a hand—gently but securely—over each of her ears.

The train chuffs, and metal squeals, and plumes of steam bloom upward to the bright blue sky, and then, with one shrill pull of the whistle, they’re rattling off.

Elysia hesitates another moment after the sound peters out before she taps the backs of Roy’s hands to indicate that it’s okay for him to let go.

“Not too bad back here, right?” Ed asks.

“Yeah,” she says, brightening immediately as she realizes that she’s going to enjoy the train rides significantly more with this new strategy at her disposal.

“Y’know,” Ed says, arching an eyebrow sideways for a second before committing his full attention to her again, “if your Uncle Roy ever needs to go out and do some Uncle Roy stuff, I could come over and watch ‘Empire Strikes Back’ with you, if you want.”

Elysia’s eyes are the color of her mother’s, but the bonfires in them are all Maes.  “Yeah!”

“Are you offering to babysit?” Roy asks.  It’s a bit—frank, as business advertisements go, but he finds that rather refreshing, to tell the truth.

“I’m not a baby,” Elysia says, looking between the two of them now.  “And I don’t want you to sit on me.”

Ed holds both hands up, pressing his lips together hard to hold back the smile.  “I wouldn’t!  No way!”

Roy leans back against the side of the car, splaying his arm out along the back.  He knows he’s wearing what Riza calls his Hunting Cat Face; he just can’t help it sometimes.  By a judicious application of the mental brakes, he manages to say “Are you offering your minor monitoring services, then?” instead of _You can sit on me any time you like._

Ed’s grin probably qualifies as a weapon in most civilized countries.  “Sure thing.  I’m pretty much making my own schedule all summer, so just give me a couple days’ heads up, and I’m all yours.”

Temptation incarnate _would_ be young and blond and indescribably beautiful in the morning light.

  


* * *

  


Roy submits his grades three days before the deadline, which is a personal record—and a substantial achievement especially juxtaposed with the three _minutes_ he had to spare the first year, before he realized quite what he was wading into.  It’s all done online, but he makes a stop at the campus anyway, partly to double-check that they’ve received everything, and partly to tidy up his office a bit before the summer sics insects of all shapes and sizes on any hidden stores of chocolate.

The receptionist has received his scores, and she assures him that everything is entered properly, so he should be good to go.

She also lowers her eyelashes, smiles, and asks him if he’d be good to go for coffee this Saturday.

If this falls through or gradually disintegrates, they almost never see each other, so it’s not going to be disruptively awkward; and if it’s an absolute cataclysm, the flaming wreckage will have all summer to cool.

All the same, he screens her with the trump card: _I’d love to, as long as I can find a sitter_.

She doesn’t say _Oh, you can bring your kids!_ , but neither does she say _Holy shit, you’re damaged goods_ —no points in any column; he’ll have to reserve judgment for now.  They exchange numbers, and on his way out the door he dials Ed.

During the year, he’d feel bad sacrificing any part of his weekend on the altar of his own sad excuse for a personal life, but Elysia’s school lets out tomorrow, so they can have fake-Saturdays all week long if she wants.  It’s a win-win, isn’t it?

He gets Ed’s message machine.  It’s probably a good thing; any merciful God would strike him down for flirting on the phone _while_ trying to secure a babysitter for a date.  That counts as hubris, most likely.  Or just as being an asshole, which really should be a smiting offense.

He keeps his voice as calm and level as he can, gives his number twice, and says “Let me know if that’ll work for you.  You can set your rate.”

He’s not surprised when he gets a text two hours later that says _HECK YEAH happy to, sounds great. what’s your address?_

  


* * *

  


Andrea is perfectly nice.

That’s the problem, actually: she errs on the side of perfect.

Her nails are perfect; so is her makeup and her hair; her clothes are perfect; she _accessorizes_ perfectly.  She bears more than a passing resemblance to a mannequin at an upscale boutique.  Is there anything wrong with that, inherently?  Of course not; and people always deck themselves out for the first date; for some reason everyone’s obsessed with first re-impressions despite the obvious fact that when you’ve already _met_ someone, you can’t erase the initial imprint and replace it with the dressed-up, cleaned-up version that they’d like you to see.

There’s nothing wrong with her at all—she’s quite charming, actually, and very smart, and really should have a more challenging job than the one she’s got.  Two years ago, he would have asked her to dinner before the latte foam had melted away; and then he would have tried to lick her tonsils for dessert; and the next weekend, he would have made some offers of extracurriculars that she couldn’t refuse.

But she doesn’t ask about Elysia—he brings her up, casually, once, twice, three times, to offer the chance.  Andrea doesn’t ask how old she is, or what she’s like, or even what her name is; and he cannot, with any contortions of his imagination, envision her scrubbing vomit out of the sheets at two in the morning and promising a sobbing princess that she doesn’t need to apologize for being sick.

Old habits perish slower than the cacti he invariably forgets, and they dug their wizened fingers in and turned his tongue when he was laying out his plan for this little date: he left them ample time for coffee _and_ a quickie in the car.  But as the clock winds down, he finds himself unprecedentedly uninterested in the latter.

He walks her down to the parking lot where she left her shiny convertible, feeling all the while like a colossal piece of shit for not finding her more amenable.  It’s not her fault.  How the hell is he supposed to communicate that in the process of avoiding the almost-promise of a goodbye kiss?

He glances into the reflection of the car door to assess his exits; a graceful egress would do wonders for his dignity.  Maybe she won’t expect the kiss—broad daylight changes the way that people approach these…

Shit, there are the eyelashes; there’s the sultry little smile.

“So,” she says.  “Can I see you again sometime?”

He isn’t feigning the regret—it’s just based in something other than what he’ll encourage her to think.  “I’m afraid I’m going to be in and out of town quite a bit.  This was lovely, though—shall I call you?”

“Please do,” she says.

He doesn’t close the distance, and the body language speaks volumes—what volumes precisely he doesn’t care; possibly she just thinks he’s too traditional to put his tongue in her mouth in public in the middle of the afternoon.  He hopes that’s what she thinks—he hopes she takes it as a compliment, one way or another; he hopes she reads it as a gesture of respect.  That’s what it is, after all: she deserves better than him going through the motions purely to be nice.

“See you around?” he asks.

She reaches out to smooth a wrinkle out of his shirt, and her fingertips on his chest carve a trail of tingling deep into the skin.  “Sounds good.”

She beeps the locks, and he opens her car door for her.  She really does have incredible legs; he could—

—call her sometime, wine and dine her, use her, leave her, make her feel like shit.

Or he could let it be.

“Drive safe,” he says, and he shuts the door.

  


* * *

  


“Hi, Uncle Roy!” Elysia calls the instant he steps through the door.

Ed waits until he’s moved into the living room to grin at him from the couch.  “Hey, how’d it go?”

The pair of them are pinned down by Jack, who’s sprawled out with his hind legs on Elysia’s lap and his head on Ed’s.  Both of them appear to have been petting him tirelessly for quite sometime; rarely has a man borne witness to a more blissed-out feline than the one Roy’s seeing now.

“It was all right,” he says, which is honest enough.  They’re in the middle of ‘A New Hope’.  “Did you two have fun?”

“Yeah!” Elysia says.  “We played Legos and then dolls and then drew stuff!  Can Ed come back next time?”

Roy raises an eyebrow over at the object of this ringing endorsement.  “I’m not sure, sweetheart.  I hope so.”

Ed’s grin—

_Hell_.

“Just say the word,” Ed says.  “I’ll be here.”

  


* * *

  


_Next time_ turns out to be a Saturday night networking event for nonfiction writers set up by one of the journals that’s published him before.  He doesn’t especially _want_ to go, but when a publisher is dangling free food and possible contacts, with cash advances on the line, he can’t exactly afford not to.  Besides, however mind-numbing the conversation turns out to be, the booze is complimentary.

Ed doesn’t seem especially keen on answering his phone, so this time around Roy texts him right off the bat, which garners an almost instantaneous response: _sure yeah! Elysia and i need to finish our marathon anyway :)_

Roy can come up with a few things he’d like to make a marathon of with Ed, an—

Don’t think it.

The other remarkable thing is that Ed seems like the sort of person who would run perpetually late by a matter of two to five minutes, simply as a matter of universal laws, but so far he always ekes in precisely at the time that Roy requested.  Possibly that’s a matter of training—literally _train_ ing, in the case of his summer job—or possibly he just… really… cares.  About this, about being here, about respecting the unwritten contract and making sure Roy’s plans go off without a hitch.

“Her usual schedule’s on the fridge,” Roy says to Ed as he shoulders on his coat, trying not to let Elysia’s puppy eyes melt his soul.  She’s only about a foot away, lingering morosely by the shoe rack; it’s a dangerous distance.  If she hugs his knees, he’s probably lost.  “Feel free to improvise a little if you need to; she doesn’t have to be back in school on Monday, so if she wants to stay up late, that’s fine.  Just keep in mind that she has been known to get rather C-R-A-N-K-Y after ten.”

Ed shoves his hands in his pockets and grins.  “Hey, me, too, sometimes.”

Roy smiles at him.  It feels nice.  “Just call if you need anything, and I do mean that—I’ll probably welcome the reprieve.”  He kneels down to meet Elysia’s enormous eyes at her level.  “Are you going to take care of Ed, Princess?”

She nods slowly.

“Did you pick a book for him to read you at bedtime?” he asks.

Another nod.

“Will you promise me you’ll try to have fun?” he asks.

Her bottom lip pushes out a little as she considers a pout.  “Well—you—you gotta promise me you’ll come in and say g’night when you get back.  Even if it’s late.  Even if it’s _really_ late.  Even if it’s the middle of the night, and I’m asleep.”

He reaches out to tuck her hair back behind her ears.  “I promise.”

Bravely, she musters a smile for him.  “Okay.”

“I know you’re going to have lots of fun,” he says.  “Just go easy on Ed, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, scuffing her sockfeet on the floor.  “I will.”

He holds his arms out, and she leaps into them and clings to him with all her might.

“It’s just going to be a couple hours,” he says, stroking her hair.  “You and Ed are going to have a great time.  Why don’t you go find whatever you want to play with first, and I’ll make sure Ed knows all the rules?”

“I can tell ’im the rules,” Elysia says, releasing him.  “I know all the rules.”  She looks up at Ed, hands folded behind her back.  “Jack isn’t allowed on the table; and anything you take out, you gotta put back; and bedtime is nine thirty except on New Year’s and special days; and if you spill stuff, it’s your responsibility to clean up.”

“I think I can handle that,” Ed says.  “But you might have to help me remember.”

Elysia nods again.  “Do you want to play dolls or dinosaurs first?”

Ed grins.  “How about both?”

Elysia grins back and then trots off, and Ed turns to Roy.

“Don’t worry about getting back tonight,” he says.  “I can stay as late as you need.”

“It shouldn’t be too long,” Roy says.  “Really, though—call me.  It’s harder for her at night sometimes; the separation anxiety is…” How to phrase this delicately?  “Well, it’s about what you’d expect from a five-year-old whose parents died in a car accident when they’d left her with a sitter.”

The pain on Ed’s face is indescribable for a second before he shutters it away.  “That’s—shitty.  If you’ll pardon my French or whatever.  That’s a pile of shit.”  He half-smiles.  “Glad she’s got you, though.”  The half-smile widens into a whole smile and then broadens into a grin.  “And glad you’re getting out for once.  Guy like you oughta be hitting the town and charming the populace.”

“I had the ‘guy like me’ years,” Roy says.  “It’s about time I started acting like a responsible adult—most people my age are desperate to start settling down with children.  I just got a head start.”

Ed raises his eyebrows, smiling slightly, and Roy just wants—

Just can’t.

“Well, for tonight,” Ed says, “don’t worry about us.  I’ll teach her how to play mancala.  My brother kicked my ass at it for a while until I realized you could calculate the game based on the moves and started cheating right back.”  He—winks.  The little _bastard_.  “I’ll go easy on her.  You go easy on _you_ , wouldya?”

Roy mock-salutes.  “Sir, yes, sir.  I’ll have a full report when I get back.”

“Awesome,” Ed says.

Elysia scampers back in bearing an armful of toys, having perked up significantly at the prospect of monopolizing Ed’s attention.  As soon as she spots Roy hovering with his hand on the doorknob, however, she drops everything in a pile and runs over to him, arms outstretched.

“It’s just a couple hours, Princess,” he says as she buries her face in his shoulder.  “You can count them down, okay?  You and Ed can make a tally sheet and keep track.  And if you need to, you can call me.  I’ll come in and say goodnight when I get home.”

“Promise?” she whispers.

“Always,” he says.

When she finally releases him, Ed pretty much shoves him out the door, which is probably a good thing given that his cab pulls up right as he reaches the end of the driveway.

Funny, almost, that it’s the first time in ages that he’s been able to go out schmoozing, and the only place he wants to be is back inside.

  


* * *

  


He zeroes in on publishers and editors, chats them up with a ruthless efficiency brilliantly disguised as jovial wit, extracts their business cards, forces his into their suit pockets, and puts his next target directly into the crosshairs once he’s left a scintillating impression they won’t soon forget.  One of them asks if he’s ever considered working on a fiction, and he says “Does my love life count?”

One of the other pathetic hack freelancers is eyeing him like he crawled up out of hell this morning and missed a spot brushing off the sulfur dust.  He can’t really blame the man for it; he’s _good_ at this—too good; it’s too easy.  He should have been a politician—should have been in the ring, gloves off, mud-splattered, bruised and battered and grinning through the blood; not on the sidelines, commentating dryly.  There’s not enough adrenaline in observation.  In another life—

But the life he has is this one, and skill is skill is skill; they lap up the persona; his cards disappear into silk-lined pockets and nestle there, glowing with their mental commendations of him; he’ll have emails by tomorrow requesting abstracts and outlines and opinions galore.  Maybe he can get Elysia some riding lessons with the extra cash.  But he should save it—for the house payments, the car payments, in case she ever slips and falls and has to go to the E.R., for her college fund, for…

“Excuse me,” a man’s voice says.

He glances up from a long, thorough perusal of the hors d’oeuvres tables (which is not especially impressive, but decent champagne makes up for a lot of mediocre food) to find the writer who was giving him such a practiced stinkeye moments ago.

…or, perhaps, not at all.  Roy’s never in his life been accused of being too sensitive—is it possible he overreacted?  This is _definitely_ not a glare he’s getting; this is a long, approving onceover.

Evidently Roy’s not the only one who’s hungry tonight.

“Daniel Opevic,” the man says, holding his hand out.  Roy shakes; Daniel’s is slightly weak.

“Roy Mustang,” he says.  “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Daniel says.  He gestures to the subtle hubbub of the room around them.  “So how about this happenin’ party, huh?”

“Not precisely the words I would have chosen,” Roy says, softening the sarcasm with a smile.  “How about it?”

“I always feel like an ass-kisser at these things,” Daniel says.  “I mean, honestly, my personality shouldn’t have any bearing on my writing, should it?  I’m not selling _me_ ; I’m selling the words.”

“Life is performative,” Roy says.  “I like to think of it as an updated version of the patronage system.  If you get deep enough into the champagne, you can almost start to imagine that you’re in Italy during the Renaissance.”

Daniel laughs.  “I think that takes more imagination than I have.”

Fortunately, Roy has not yet drunk enough to lose his filter, so he swallows _You’re probably not much of a writer, then_ fairly gracefully.  “Think of it this way—if you could afford to pass up free food, would you be here begging for publications?”

“Good point,” Daniel says, turning to survey the table.  “What’s worth trying?”

“The booze,” Roy says, which is—regrettably—the honest truth.

Daniel laughs again.  Roy’s not _that_ funny, and he knows it; insincerity is hardly a compliment, so he’s not sure why so many people flirt by pretending every sally is exemplary.

But he should be fair, or fair _er_ , at least—Daniel’s younger than him, by a matter of three or four years, he’d guess; and attractive enough but obviously a bit out of his element.

Daniel’s element seems to be settling in around him, however, if the new gleam of his eyes and the changing cant of his hips is any indication.

“Can I get you another glass?” he asks.  “I need one—I’m going to step out for a breather.  Care to join me?”

It wouldn’t take an ex-scoundrel of Roy’s caliber to know what that means.

He vacillates for a long moment—it would be lovely, wouldn’t it?  It would be delightful.

It would be exactly like what he didn’t do to Andrea—but sleazier still; a dalliance at a free dinner would be an all-new zenith of reprehensibility even by his rigorous standards for bad behavior.

There are times that he wants to go back—minutes, hours, even days.  There are times that he misses the flighty, flippant, happy-go-lucky days of breaking hearts and rumpling sheets; of playing the game like chess, for the hell of it, for the thrill, without so much as a fragment of a desire to win.  Deliberate destruction was every bit as fun as success.  Maes used to call him—

Well.  Maes used to do a lot of things.  But Maes is dead, and Roy is here, and Roy is carrying Maes’s crosses now.

“Come on,” Daniel says, touching his forearm.  There goes the last gasp of subtlety.  “It won’t take long.  You want to split a cigarette?”

“Thank you,” Roy says, “but I’d better not.  I have a little girl waiting for me at home.”

Daniel blinks, fingertips still grazing Roy’s sleeve.  “…I… I’m sorry.  I… assumed… I mean, you can _dress_ yourself; I thought…”

“No,” Roy says.  “Literally.  A five-year-old.”

Daniel blinks.  “Oh.  I didn’t think you were…”

“A family man?” Roy asks.  “Neither did I.”

Daniel gestures to his bare left hand.  “Married.”

“I’m not,” Roy says.  “It’s a bit of a long story.”

Daniel raises an eyebrow and grins, tilting his head towards the milling crowd.  “We’ve got a bit of a long time.”

“Well,” Roy says, thanking his lucky stars that he put the nice watch on for the sake of being impressive; it gives him something to faux-glance at.  “My sitter is only available for another hour, I’m afraid, and I really do need to make the rounds again…” Politeness is an absolute _bitch_.  If only he could just say _I’m in the business of writing, not of giving out pity fucks_ and be done with it.  “Would you like to come with me?  We could double-team them.  They’d never know what hit them.”

Daniel frowns slightly.  “Then they’d probably expect us to work together and produce twice as much for the same rate.  Probably better not.”  He half-lifts his glass.  “All yours.”

Roy forces an easy-looking smile and mock-toasts back.  “Thank you.”

If there’s one thing Roy knows for sure by now, it’s that life is much too brief and far too cruel to waste time giving a flying fuck what other people think.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting sometimes.

And what’s so wrong with that?  Sometimes it’s good, in a way, to feel things acutely; to dial right in to the strong feelings; to acknowledge the sparks of pain when the waves of numbness start to swell, and all of it seems _unnecessary_.  Sometimes the sting is a blessing.

Somehow—there’s something about his particular brand of not-exactly-lucky that tends to make such things more likely—Roy ends up in an animated conversation with an editor who is extremely passionate about the Oxford comma, the death of grammar, and spelling out numerals.  After several minutes, Roy manages to free himself from the fetters of pedantic discussion long enough to make a last round of the publishing parties and thank them all graciously for this exquisite opportunity and the honor of their presence, etcetera and so on; and shortly after that, he seriously considers the faint gleam at the bottom of his empty champagne glass and decides that it’s probably time to go home.  It’s fortuitous that some programming polyglot whipped up an app for calling back taxicabs; he’s not sure how well he’d fare with phone numbers right now.  Come to think of which, he doubts he’ll be any damn good with tipping, either; unless he wants a shock to the wallet, he should probably see if he can figure out now what he’ll want to leave, based on a general idea of the total cost, which will probably be fairly consistent with what it took to get here…

He remembers bleary snatches of explaining to the cabbie that political science involves tragically little of what one would ordinarily associate with the term; and that many, if not most, political scientists are either entirely uninterested in modern affairs, or could care less about acting upon politics itself, as they find commentating on the whole pageant like the two old men critics in the Muppets much more enjoyable all around.  He thinks he confessed to indulging in perhaps more than his share of the commentating.

One way or another, he ends up standing on his own doorstep with his keys in his hand, which is progress.  He’s just intoxicated enough that things are a bit swirly around the edges, and his balance is slightly off-kilter, off-center, just… off.  It’s like he’s standing on the deck of a very gently-moving ship.  His thoughts are still mostly linear, and largely coherent, but the combination of champagne and overall weariness has made a few of the smaller pieces drop right out of his memory and disappear.

It’s a pleasant sort of tipsiness, teetering on the cusp of something worse—he can feel the bubbles inside himself, shimmering, bursting, coalescing in his head; light, bright, sweet, pearly; and when they pop, it’s like a rain of stardust, like a gleam of iridescence underscored with gold.

Gold like the splay of silken hair shining in the lamplight in his living room, where Ed has crashed out on the couch snuggled up with a textbook.  He doesn’t rouse so much as a snore when Roy softly shuts the door again.

Roy gives himself a moment, just a _moment_ , to look—unabashedly, unreservedly.  He can’t help wondering what Ed’s parents looked like, how the famous brother’s face compares.  Blonds usually have pale eyelashes, but Ed’s are the thickest he’s ever seen, and darker than the circles underneath his eyes.  His lips are parted just a touch, and his bangs have slipped halfway across his forehead; the tips of the hairs flutter when he breathes.  He probably leaned back against the couch arm thinking he’d just rest his eyes for a moment; he has both arms clutched protectively around the book, with one leg dangling over the edge (not _quite_ to the floor) and the other folded up behind him.

Roy wants to kiss him, but he’s not _that_ drunk.  This isn’t a damn Disney movie; romance doesn’t blossom from the ether right when you want it most.  It wouldn’t even be romantic; it’d be _assault_.

He wouldn’t actually do it; he wouldn’t act on that impulse in a thousand years.  He’s not stupid—just lonely.  Just so, so damn tired and so, so alone.

He’s going to give Ed as much sleep as possible—the poor kid looks like he needs it; looks like he’s burning his candle from both ends and simultaneously trying to crack it open to find another piece of wick in the middle.  Roy toes his shoes off by the door and creeps on by; Elysia’s door is open a crack, with the soft glow of her nightlight radiating from the gap.  The hinges always squeak unless you ease it open as slowly as humanly possible; he keeps meaning to swing by the hardware store and pick up some grease or something, but…

Well.

In the meantime, he slips in as quietly as he can manage with the edges of his vision blurring just so.  Elysia is a tiny lump beneath the pink dragon bedspread she fell in love with at the store; at times like this, he almost can’t bear to conceptualize just how small and vulnerable she is against the whole damn world—against a whole damn world of vicious fucking misery just waiting to descend.  How can anyone have the fucking gall to bring a child into this place?  How could anyone willingly subject another human being to this universe and all its cruelty; all its caprices; all its crushing fucking _indifference_ to your basic survival, let alone _success_ —?

He just wants her to be happy.  He just wants her to be happy, and safe; happier and safer than he’s been; he just wants her to forget, one day, how much was taken for her before she’d even learned how to appreciate what she had.

He kneels down next to the bed and lays his hand on her shoulder gently.  “Sweetheart,” he whispers.

Her eyes open a sliver, and then a bleary smile splits her face, and she reaches both arms out towards him.  He hugs her, brushes her hair back from her forehead, kisses it, and tucks the blankets in around her again.

“Goodnight, Princess,” he says.

“G’night, Uncle Roy,” she mumbles.

He closes the door behind him almost-soundlessly—which, considering the vindictive designs of those hinges, is something of an accomplishment—and then steps back out into the living room, where he faces a rather less familiar slumbering figure and something of a conundrum.

He considers dropping something loudly and pretending it was an accident, but he doesn’t want to startle his unanticipated guest any more than necessary.  Besides, his touted dignity chafes somewhat at the prospect of resorting to such a slapstick maneuver to meet his goal.  (His touted dignity is choosing to ignore the fact that his Facebook profile picture shows him solemnly modeling Elysia’s hair design handiwork on an occasion that involved dozens of pink barrettes.)

In the end, it seems that the simple solution rules: he crosses to the couch—scanning the carpet for abandoned toys and malevolent-minded Legos as he goes, but, incredibly, the floor is spotless—and crouches down a respectful distance from Ed, at which point he repeats his strategy, reaching out so he’ll be able to brush his fingers very lightly against Ed’s arm.  Arms are safe, aren’t they?  Unsuggestive?  Platonic?  Not stalker-creepy-weirdo-old-man-coming-on-to-the-babysi—

Just before his fingertips make contact, Ed jolts awake so violently that Roy instinctively leans backwards, which tips his balance off of the balls of his feet and lands him squarely on his ass.

Touted dignity indeed.

Ed’s eyes are so wild for a fraction of a moment that Roy’s heart leaps up to his throat and throbs there, blocking his breath—in this small, frozen second, those are not the eyes, and this is not the face, of a vibrant, devil-may-care young academic; they are not the eyes of anyone who has _ever_ been a child.  They are the eyes of a man who can’t afford to sleep too deeply, because the night is when the monsters come.

Then he blinks, and the humming pale blue light at the edges of Roy’s vision seeps away.

“ _Shit_ ,” Ed blurts out, emphatically, scrambling upright, fighting for a grip on the cover of his book.  “She’s—is she—?  Everything—?  Sorry, I—” He grinds the heel of his hand at his eyes, scowling fit to strain a muscle in his jaw.  “I shouldn’t’ve—”

“No, no,” Roy cuts in before it’s too late.  “ _I’m_ sorry; I didn’t want to wake you, but it looked like you were about to get a crick in your neck that would have lasted you for weeks.”

Ed favors him with a tired sort of smile.  Oh, God.  Oh, _God_ , he’s so much older underneath the sprightly surface than Roy ever would have guessed.  “Sleepin’ on the job is pretty shitty, even for me.”

They’re too close, and Roy is too tempted—too weak.

He knows better; he has to _be_ better; he…

Hell.

He stands, pretending not to hear the way his knees crack, and brushes some imaginary wrinkles from his shirt.  “As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “the job ended when you put her to bed, since that was the last thing I requested of you.  After that, the time was yours.”

Ed is too cute.  Ed is too goddamn _cute_ with a line from the couch imprinted on one flushed cheek and his movements slumber-clumsy and his hair askew, gleaming gold strands draggling into his bleary eyes.  Roy has to find a way to be stronger than this; he doesn’t have a choice; he can’t…

He can’t.  Simple as that.

He produces a polite smile and starts for the kitchen.  “In any case, I’m late anyway, so if one of us violated the terms of our agreement, it was me.”

Ed scrubs at his eyes again, not that Roy is watching.  “Well, I—I mean, I told you to take your time, so…” He clears his throat.  Roy would give a _hand_ for the right, the privilege, the _blessing_ to wrap him into a blanket, coo over his sleepiness, laugh at his objections, kiss him, hold him, carry him to bed— “I mean, you shouldn’t pay me for the part where I was passed out.  That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t,” Roy says.  “Tonight it can be unfair in your favor.”

Ed scowls at him, and he grins back.  Then he turns, and—

“Did you _do my dishes_?” he asks.

Ed tilts his head away and rubs at the back of his neck with one hand, which is just about the most gobsmackingly goddamn charming thing Roy has ever seen in his pathetic life.  “Well… I mean, they were _there_.”

“And for some reason,” Roy says, “you’re insisting that I _shouldn’t_ pay you?”

Roy has to retract his previous thought when Ed blushes hotly, which is even freaking cuter.  “Well—I probably didn’t do a very good job.”

Roy raises one eyebrow as painstakingly slowly as he can in his current state of slight inebriation.

“Okay, what _ever_ ,” Ed says, trying—and-failing—to stifle a grin.  “I’ll accept it as a tip.”

“Good,” Roy says.

A long moment stretches out wherein neither of them move—they just _look_ at each other, and that’s… strange, isn’t it?  Roy heard or read somewhere that extended eye contact can only mean two things: that you want to fight, or you want to fuck.  He probably bemoaned the death of soulful gazes or something of the sort; he probably laughed at the general accuracy.

The little half-smile that lights on Ed’s face as he ducks, suddenly, and gathers up his book does not seem especially confrontational.

Roy crosses back over to the couch, fishing out his wallet as he goes.  Fifteen dollars an hour times six hours is ninety, plus extra for dishes and a bit extra on top of that for being beautiful and sweet and so damn good with Elysia that she talks about him like a new best friend, not a babysitting overlord…

“I can’t take that,” Ed says, staring blankly at the hundred and the twenty in Roy’s outstretched hand.

“I’m sure you can,” Roy says.  “It’s very easy; I promise.  First you pick them up, and then you put them in your pocket, and—”

“Fuck you; you know what I _meant_ ,” Ed says, struggling with a grin again—and then he looks horrified.

“Of course I did,” Roy says, winking at him; and if it wasn’t already agonizingly obvious that the universe doesn’t give a fig for justice, he’d know from the warm billow of beautiful relief swelling in his chest as Ed relaxes.  “Isn’t that half the fun?”

“Fun for who?” Ed asks, but the pretense of grousing is thin yet while he recovers, and it’s just…

It’s darling.  It is _darling_ , though Roy expects he’d be summarily castrated if he articulated it in so many words.

“‘For whom’, you mean,” Roy says.  He catches the corners of the bills and dangles them over Ed’s head.  “Would you like me to tuck them into your clothes instead?”

Ed snickers and—finally, _finally_ —snatches them out of the air, crumpling them in his hand.  “If you’re gonna give it to me like _that_ , you oughta get a show first.”

Eye contact again—absolutely uninterrupted; seconds pass; Roy loses track and cannot breathe.

“Do you accept non-monetary tips as well?” he asks with some paltry fraction of his voice—whatever’s left in his lungs when Ed owns all the air.

Ed’s eyes dart to his mouth, oh, _God_ ; he _gets_ it; he _knows_ ; he hasn’t yet applied his fist to the bridge of Roy’s nose in recompense—

Is it _possible_ that—?

Ed licks his lips and then curls them into a cautious little smile.

“Honestly?” he asks.  “Depends who’s giving ’em.”

“I see,” Roy manages.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and his voice keeps getting softer, and lower, and is it really Roy’s fault he’s leaning down and cursing the couch back rearing up between them?  “I, um.  I bet you tip pretty well, though.  You seem like the type.”

“Do I,” Roy says.

It occurs to him that he has not said anything that evokes even a semblance of intellect in the last several minutes, but he’s finding it increasingly difficult to care.

Ed swallows, hard, and shifts up closer to the back of the couch, slinging one arm over it to support himself; they’re six inches apart—five, four, three, good _God_ —

“You can do so much better,” Roy says.

“How drunk _are_ you?” Ed asks.

“Hardly at all,” Roy says, which perhaps is generous, but—

Ed closes his eyes for a second, and Roy feels bereft, and this has gone _much_ too far, _much_ too fast.  “If that’s—if that’s why—then—I’d really rather n—”

Short of spontaneous combustion, Roy’s not sure how to respond, but he digs up his voice:

“Edward,” he says, “I’ve been hopelessly attracted to you since the moment I laid eyes on you.  The champagne is just making me forthright about it.”

A nervous little laugh stutters out past Ed’s lips, and the heat of his breath is a thousand times more intoxicating than anything they could have served at that party—it goes _right_ to Roy’s head and holds him rapt.

“Can’t believe you just said ‘forthright’ when you’re drunk,” he mutters, looking away.  “I can’t even string a fucking sentence together when I’ve had a few.”

“Just talented, I guess,” Roy says.

Ed swallows, and his eyes flick to Roy’s again, then down, then up again—flashing gold like fairy lights, here and gone.

“Have you—” He draws a breath, half-smiles, and Roy wants so _fervently_ to see it whole.  “You ever wanted something so bad you can hardly stand it, but you _know_ you’d fuck it up, so probably you shouldn’t get it at all?”

“You won’t,” Roy says.

“You don’t know,” Ed says, and the smile tilts terrible—faint and sharp and sad.  “I would.”

“You won’t,” Roy says again, softer.  “I know a thing or two about people by now, Ed.  And I know a thing or two about you.”

“A thing or two, maybe,” Ed says, and the gleam in his eyes speaks volumes more, “but not much.”

“I want to,” Roy says.  Funny, isn’t it, how different words sound when they resonate inside you from their own truth first.  “I want to know everything.”  Slowly, gently, giving Ed more time than he could possibly need to scowl or respond or recoil, Roy reaches out and smooths a lock of hair back behind his ear.  “I want to know how you take your coffee and what keeps you up at night and how you look when you wake up and what colors make you smile.”

“Colors don’t do much for me,” Ed says, and his voice wavers, and holy _hell_ , that hurts.

“What does?” Roy asks.

“Lately,” Ed says, and his hand lifts, and his fingers start to curl in midair and then hesitate, hanging in between them.  “Lately… you.”

“What a coincidence,” Roy says.  “Lately—”

“Fuck,” Ed mutters, eyes wide, and his hand curls around the knot of Roy’s tie and tugs him forward, and—

The couch back digs in against the bottom curve of Roy’s ribcage like this, and his head still teeters back and forth with the lingering ripples of the champagne—slowly, spinning, like a blurry dream.  Like a carousel.

And Ed’s kiss is so soft and so sweet and so desperate and so _delectable_ that Roy doesn’t know what will come first—his knees giving way, or gravity failing altogether so that they both float right up to the ceiling.

Ed forgets to breathe—the sheer cuteness of which stabs another silver skewer of damning adoration right through the meat of Roy’s heart—so Roy draws back a touch before the poor kid manages to asphyxiate himself, leaning their foreheads together.

“Well,” he says, breathing lightly, wishing he could _drink_ the flush that’s spreading on Ed’s cheeks.  “That answers one of my questions about you.”

“What,” Ed says, voice grinding slightly hoarse, “that I kiss like shit?”

“Like absolution,” Roy says.  “Like transcendence.”

Ed chokes out half a laugh.  “Like _fuck_.  You’re so drunk.  Oh, my God, if I wasn’t already going to hell—you’re—”

“I am not drunk,” Roy says, trailing two fingertips back along his cheekbone and down to graze his jaw.  “And you’re not going to hell.  I’m just uninhibited.”

Ed’s hand lifts and wraps itself around Roy’s wrist as Roy strokes at the wispy hairs just in front of Ed’s ear, but then it—stays there.  It doesn’t pull his arm away.

“Your vocabulary is something fuckin’ else,” Ed says.

“Thank you,” Roy says, “I think.”

A sleek shadow leaps up onto the couch and fixes bright yellow eyes on Roy, then Ed, then Roy again.  Ed laughs faintly and—unless Roy really is drunk enough to mistake it— _reluctantly_ lets both of their hands fall away from his face.

“I don’t think you should pet me in front of the cat,” he says.  “He’ll get all jealous.  I saw a horror movie like that once.”

“Jack is perhaps the least devious feline I’ve ever found,” Roy says, leaning further over the couch back to scratch obligingly behind one ear.  One of the yellow eyes snaps shut, and the other meets Ed’s almost identical ones—expectantly.

“Yeah,” Ed says, giving the cat’s free ear similar treatment.

Jack, who is fast rising on the list of most spoiled pets in the universe, closes both eyes now and commences a purr that’s almost deafening in the heavy silence.  Every time Roy’s knuckles brush Ed’s, Ed blushes again.

“He’s a really good cat,” Ed says, and there’s something slightly helpless in the dart of his gaze, like he’s terrified to let this situation spiral out of his control.  “And I’m not just saying that to bail out of the jealousy-slash-horror-movie thing.  And, I mean—Elysia’s such a good kid.  You’ve done pretty well for yourself.  Right up until now, anyway.”

Roy raises an eyebrow and releases just a sliver of the smile that wants to explode out of him with enough force to obliterate the entire block.  “May I take you out to dinner?”

Ed blinks his enormous eyes.  “ _Now_?”

“Well,” Roy says, “I was thinking next weekend, but if you really want, I’m sure Denny’s would have a table for two at th—”

“ _Shut_ it,” Ed says, and by the contortion of his mouth, it’s taking everything he has to bite back the laughter.  “I—I mean—are you—serious?  You’re still going to—I mean, tomorrow?  When you’re not totally wasted and saying all kinds of stupid shit?”

“Is it stupid to want you?” Roy asks.

“Yes,” Ed says—instantaneous, instinctive, without a hint of reservation or a single second thought.

At that moment, within the safety of his own head, Roy makes both of them a promise—he is going to prove the truth of the opposite to this beautiful young man no matter how long it takes.  He _will_.

“I respectfully disagree,” he says for now.  There will be time; he’ll find time; he’ll _make_ time—there will be time to spell out the poetry of Ed’s every line, every angle, every aspect onto his own skin with lips and tongue and fingertips; there will be time to teach him not just how to _be_ loved, but how to _accept_ it, how to bask in it and breathe it in and _bloom_.

Ed smiles, the color in his cheeks deepening, and the giddiness of it beats in Roy’s blood so feverishly he can’t help grinning back.

“Whatever,” Ed says.  “Dinner.  Next weekend.  Or some shit.”

“Or some shit,” Roy says.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am actually just a semi-animated pile of low-quality schmoop, and sometimes I pour some onto the page.
> 
> P.S. EDITING IS FOR N00BS

Roy thinks intently about the venue—Ed seems like the type who would appreciate good food if he ever had the chance, but also like he’d balk hard the second he set foot somewhere that he thought was too posh for the likes of him.

Wednesday night, Roy sends another text message—Ed never picks up the damn phone; Roy can’t fathom if it’s a phobia or some sort of hangup (pun unintended, but he’ll take credit for it anyway); or whether it’s simply more convenient to conceal a screen beneath his thumbs than a brick against his ear.

_How is Saturday night for you, at Le Bonheur, say seven?_

As usual, Ed texts back almost instantaneously.  Maybe Roy should just get with the times.

_holy shit you really meant it.  i owe Al money now.  i figured you just say that to every babysitter you make out with.  speaking of which you need a new one if you’re going out with the one you’ve got.  you want me to ask Al?_

There’s almost too much information in that set of sentences for Roy to unpack.

 _Ah,_ he sends back, _for the record, I have never made out with a babysitter before.  I would be honored to meet your brother regardless, and it would be wonderfully convenient if he was able to watch Elysia.  Could you ask him?  And add “pretty please” from me?_

Momentarily, the phone shudders in his hand with Ed’s response.  He quite likes the idea of making Ed shudder in situations that have something to do with vibrating, but not a lot to do with phones.

He ought to get his mind out of the gutter and keep it safely dry, but he’s only a _man_ , and when what’s on the line is something so extraordinarily precious he can’t believe he’s insinuated his way into half a chance—

_Al said “everything he does must be rather pretty if the hotness scale on his ratemyprofessor profile is to be believed.” what the HELL, is that actually a thing? but anyway he said he’ll do it. gotta warn you Elysia isn’t going to settle for me after she meets Al though, everybody likes him better._

Is it too early?

Ah, the hell with it; there’s no time like the present to hurl caution out the window of a moving vehicle and watch it whip away into the distance.

_I don’t know about that; I certainly like you best._

Is that too sappy?  It’s too sappy.  And it’s too _late_ , damn it; in the throes of giddy optimism, his thumb tapped the button to send.

But perhaps—perhaps—not all is lost.  Ed responds almost instantly:

_YOU HAVEN’T MET HIM YET EITHER shit maybe it’s a terrible idea to bring him, you’ll want to date him instead_

Is there a risk of damaging your facial muscles if you simply can’t stop smiling?

_I highly doubt that.  I am rather committed to the idea of dating you regardless of what he’s like._

He’s probably entered the advanced stages of… something.  His jaw will never be the same; his cheekbones absolutely _ache_.  The worst part is how much he loves it.

 _well i guess that’s good_ , Ed replies.  _since he’s mostly straight i think.  although anyone with eyeballs would go gay for you_

That is perhaps the single crudest as well as the most touchingly sincere compliment Roy has ever received.

 _Thank you?_ he sends.  _I think.  I’m almost positive._

Ed’s fingers must be flying.  Roy can’t help it, can’t help thinking about the smooth little pads of the smart little fingertips; can’t help wondering how they’d feel on his face, on his eyelids, on his jaw, his cheeks, his lips—

_yeah it was meant as a compliment haha.  i guess you can always switch to Al at the last minute if you realize you’re making a TERRIBLE MISTAKE and whatever.  although i gotta warn you he’ll talk your ear off about kittens.  you’d be surprised how many things there are to say about kittens apparently._

Roy doesn’t want his ear talked off; he wants it nibbled on, gently, and he knows precisely which mouth he’d like to enlist.

Good God, when did the great Roy Mustang sink so low as to metamorphose into a hopelessly lonely, helplessly randy old man?

The real pity is that he knows the answer to that.

Fortunately, one of his many talents is his inimitable ability to smokescreen his deep-set inner impurities with an overabundance of schmaltz.  No one ever suspects a thing.

 _You are many things, Edward,_ he writes, _but a mistake is not one of them._

Ed’s reply is as inspiring as always:

_OH BARF.  just don’t say i didn’t warn you._

_I wouldn’t dream of it,_ Roy sends—which is true.  He knows what he’ll be dreaming of instead.

It’s only when he puts the phone back into his pocket that he notices Elysia’s eyes on him.  She beams.  “Are you talking to Ed?”

He raises his eyebrows but makes sure to soften it with a smile.  “I am.  How did you know that?”

She shrugs, hopping down from the table and then struggling on her tiptoes to reach her homework pages so she can put them away.  “You always look real happy when you do.”

Roy stares at her.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing,” he says, instead of _You are your father’s daughter straight through._   “I didn’t notice.”  Her tiny fingertips keep sweeping over the edge of some bizarre fill-in-the-blank exercise or other, and he gets up to help.  “Here, sweetheart.  Are you okay with having Ed’s brother here with you on Saturday night?”

Elysia makes a five-year-old’s earnest and utterly ineffective attempt to straighten the papers and gather them all into her arms, and then she frowns deeply.

“Yeah,” she says, slowly and with tremendous gravity.  “It’d be better if it was Ed.  But I want to meet Al, too.  Ed thinks he’s really great.”

“That I had noticed,” Roy says.

  


* * *

  


The hours crawl; the week dribbles through his fingers slowly, and it leaves a viscous residue—oil, not water; Friday drags for what feels like an eon.

Excellent word, _eon_ —far too short for what it means; at least eternity maximizes its own syllables.  The beauty of the irony is not lost even in the plummeting depths of Roy’s despair as the minutes creep past like an oxcart hitched to weary snails.

Elysia should not be old enough to be giving him significant looks all night long, but apparently she missed the memo that such things are reserved for individuals who have inhabited the planet for more than half a decade at a stretch.  Maes would be so damn proud he’d split into a dozen pieces of pure delight.

When they finally settle down for a little jaunt around Narnia before bedtime, she reaches both arms up towards him, and he leans into the hug.

“What’s this for?” he asks.

“Just ’cause,” she says.

  


* * *

  


Ed seems to be staging another demonstration of his nick-of-time punctuality, leaving Roy fighting the urge to pace the front hall like a caged cat.  Jack must be able to read the feline instinct in him; rarely has Roy received such a sympathetic tail-twitch.

He makes himself sit down with Elysia instead.  She’s been perfectly cheerful all week, but now that the reality of Roy cutting out on her _two weekends in a row_ is sinking in, she’s gone quiet and curled up into a little pigtailed ball of trepidation on the couch.

“Do you know what you’d like to do when Al gets here?” he asks her.

She nods, then extracts an arm from the knot of child to point at the puzzles and the paper dolls that she’s collected on the table.

“That looks like fun,” he says.

Elysia opens her mouth and then closes it and wriggles herself tighter, hiding all of her face except for her eyes behind her folded arms.

He reaches out and tugs very gently on one pigtail, then smooths it down.  “What is it?”

She shakes her head.

“We won’t be gone very long,” he says softly.  “Just dinner, that’s all.  Two hours—maybe two and a half.  How many minutes is that?”

“S’sixty minutes in an hour,” Elysia mumbles, more to her forearm than to him.

“You could have Al help you count out the minutes,” Roy says.

Elysia avoids his eyes.  “S’a lot.”

“I know,” Roy says.  “It’s longer than Star Wars.  But not very much.”

She glances at him, gauging his sincerity.

“Really,” he says.  “‘A New Hope’ is a hundred and twenty-one minutes.  Two and a half hours is a hundred and fifty.  That’s only twenty-nine minutes more.”

Elysia’s eyes narrow slightly as she thinks it over.  Behind the safety of her crossed arms, she’s probably chewing on her lip while she works on it.

“Do you want me to bring you something back?” he asks.  “How about some dessert?  Would you like that?  I could put it in the fridge for you, and you could have it tomorrow after lunch.”

She looks at him for a long moment, searchingly, before she nods.

“Is there something in particular you’d like me to bring?” he asks.  “Or should I make it a surprise?”

“Surprise,” she says quietly, ducking her head and pulling at one of the ruffles on the bottom of her skirt.

“Okay,” he says.

It’s a shitty no-win, isn’t it?  If he never leaves her alone, it’ll only exacerbate the problem; if he tears himself away, she keeps her tight hold on his feeble heart and rips it right out of him.  Hurting her is the worst thing he can _think_ of; it doesn’t matter if it’s for her own good.  Hasn’t the world wounded her enough without his cordial assistance?

There’s a brisk knock at the door just as he begins to contemplate calling the whole thing off.

“Are you ready?” he asks Elysia.  “Ed says Al is very nice.”

“I know,” she says.  She worries her lip between her teeth for another second and then musters a slow nod in answer to his question.

He holds his hand out to her—she hops down from the couch to take it, and he leads the way to the door.

Al is not _quite_ the spitting image of his elder brother—for one thing, he’s a whole head taller; for another, his eyes are more olive-toned than honey-brown; for a third, they’re shaped differently; and for a fourth, his shoulders are narrower than Ed’s, and his current grin is brighter.

“Hello!” he says.  “I’m Al.”  Immediately he crouches down and holds his hand out to Elysia.  “Are you Miss Hughes?  I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Elysia shakes, smiling shyly.  “You c’n call me Elysia if you want.”

“Thank you,” Al says.  “It’s very nice to meet you.”

He stands up—not too fast—and offers Roy the same handshake and the same beaming grin.  “Mr. Mustang?”

“Roy, please,” Roy says, emphatically meaning it.  For some reason, _Sir_ doesn’t bother him, but every time someone calls him _Mister_ in a store, he feels about a thousand years old.  And crusty.

“Roy it is,” Al says cheerfully as Roy takes his hand.  “And might I just say that you seem really clean after a quick internet background check?”  He tightens his grip on Roy’s fingers, and his smile takes on just the slightest edge of—murder.  That’s what it is.  It’s _murder_.  “I sure hope that stays true.”

“Oh, my _God_ , Al,” Ed says.  Roy risks glancing away from Al long enough to appreciate the rich shade of vermillion Ed’s face has turned.  “If he was some kind of serial killer—which is a _lot_ less statistically likely than you seem to think—do you really figure I’d’ve survived two nights alone hanging around his house?  He walked in on me _sleeping_ once.  Would’ve been the perfect crime.”

Roy recognizes that he’s still clutching Al’s hand, and his mouth has fallen open, but in his current state of frozen horror, he’s powerless to change either of those things.

Elysia giggles quietly.

“You guys are weird,” she says.  She hesitates, gauges Al with a cautious upward glance, and then steps forward and tugs on the leg of his jeans.  “Do you like Star Wars, too?”

Al kneels immediately to level with her again.  “I love it,” he says.  “Do you like Legos?”

Elysia’s eyes widen, and she nods.

“Great!” Al says.  He shoulders his backpack off and unzips it, holding it open to show her the contents.  “I got a kit for making X-wings.  Do you want to try?”

Elysia looks like a kid in a candy store.  Actually, she looks like herself in a toy store, and like her _father_ in a candy store.  “Only—we have to be careful, ’cause if you leave any pieces on the floor, Jack tries to eat them, sometimes.”

“Who’s Jack?” Al asks.

“He’s our kitty,” Elysia says.

Al turns a slow, dark look up towards Ed.  “You didn’t tell me they had a _cat_.  I wouldn’t have had to give him the third degree and the shovel speech if I’d known _that_ little detail, _Brother_.”

Ed sighs.  Roy dares to look at him—to look at him _properly_ —for the first time since this wild encounter started to unfold.  He looks… gorgeous.  Gorgeous and uncomfortable; stunning and uncertain and breathtakingly hot.  He also looks like he’s expecting Roy to turn around and close the door; like he thinks _anyone_ on the _planet_ could resist fitted black slacks and a dark red shirt beneath a black waistcoat; like Roy hasn’t already had the Regency romance novel-themed _dream_ about him like this—

He shifts his weight between both feet and jerks his thumb back towards his beat-to-crap Accord.  “I have a—jacket in the car, if you want; it was hard to tell from the reviews and stuff how fancy this place is, so… so yeah.”

“You’re perfect,” Roy says.  Ed’s face takes on an even more distinct deer-in-the-headlights quality, and then it clicks.  _Fuck_.  “I mean, you—look perfect.  That’s perfect.  It’s perfectly fine.”

Ed’s blush deepens beautifully.  “Um—okay.  Cool.  Okay.”

“Oh, jeez,” Al says.  “You two should get out of here; you’re going to miss your reservation.”

Roy clears his throat.  “Everything you need is—”

“On the refrigerator?” Al asks.  Still kneeling, he pats Elysia’s shoulder.  “We’re clever; we’ll figure it out.  Hey, Elysia—can you introduce me to Jack?  Kitties are my _favorite_.”

“They should make a Star Wars with kitties in it,” Elysia says, taking his hand and starting to drag him, so that he has to follow her in a hilariously awkward half-crab-crawl.  “Then it’d be all our favorite stuff at once.”

“You’re _really_ smart,” Al says.

Roy’s not sure he’s ever had a babysitter shut his own front door in his face before, but he’s having some trouble processing information at the moment, so it’s difficult to know much of anything for sure.

“Well,” he says.

“They’re gonna be thick as thieves,” Ed says.  “We’re gonna come back to a fully-illustrated retelling of the entire Star Wars extended universe where everyone is cats.”

“I look forward to it,” Roy says.  He holds his arm out, elbow crooked.  “But not as much as I’m looking forward to th—”

“Oh, _barf_ ,” Ed says, batting his arm away, blush hotter than Venus and redder than Mars.  “You wanna drive?  I suck at parking when I’m—nervous.  Or whatever.”

“I’ll confess to a little whateverness myself,” Roy says.  “And I’m happy to drive.”

Ed spends about a quarter of a second looking between his Accord and the lovingly-tended, meticulously-repaired, newly-polished ’78 Firebird sitting in the open garage.

“ _Damn_ ,” he says.  “Yeah, why don’t you?”

“My pleasure,” Roy says, and if spinning the keys around his finger is a touch ostentatious—well.  Who the hell can blame him for a bit of showmanship at a time like this?

“Damn,” Ed says again after he settles—carefully, mindful of the silver chain trailing from his front belt loop into his back pocket, which presumably holds his keys but is currently serving the double purpose of making Roy want to use it to haul him into a crushing kiss to thank him for his concern.  “I didn’t know you were into cars.”

“It was something of an accident,” Roy says.  And the beauty of it is that the low, loud rumble of the engine rattles right through his very bones and shakes the hesitation loose and shatters it to dust, and as he backs into the street and then accelerates, the particles all blow away.  “This was Elysia’s father’s—he called it his ‘quarter-life crisis’ car.  He only got as far as tearing out the engine before… before he and Gracia died.  So I ended up with it, and it reminded both of us of him, so I… started a lot of meaningful conversations with the man who runs the shop class at the college—he’s incredible, as it turns out; his name is Kain; you’ll love him—and ended up buried in car parts and smeared in motor oil more weekends than not.  Elysia was my designated counter of bolts and carrier of objects and polisher of things—so she wouldn’t be out of my sight, partly, and also because I… wanted her to have a hand in it.  In any case, here we are.”

Ed runs his palm appreciatively along the smooth dashboard and then smiles over at him.  “Yeah.  Here we are.”

  


* * *

  


It’s funny, isn’t it, how all of the cardio workouts in the world can’t prepare one’s heart for moments like this?  The skittering, the swooping at the ease of conversation as they drive—the soaring, the _flight_ as he saunters into the almost-too-charming ambiance of Le Bonheur with one hand grazing the small of Edward’s back; the way the gazes of the dozens waiting linger on them, and he can’t tell who they’re jealous of, and the stroke to his ego is incomparable in every possible way—

The plummeting of it into the roiling acid in the pit of his stomach as the hostess utters unimaginable words:

“I’m afraid I don’t see a reservation for you, sir.”

He stares at her.

She blinks back.

“I made it last week,” he says.  “Monday.  I spoke to someone named Alicia.”

The current hostess, whose nametag does _not_ damningly display the same name, bites her lip.  “We did have some technical difficulties with our computer system earlier in the week, sir.  It is possible—”

“That it ate my reservation?” he asks.  He has to handle this with grace; it’s no one’s fault; he has to… not panic about the fact that this date just spiraled out of his control and landed in a steaming trash heap.  “I suppose it makes sense for even the computers to be hungry in a restaurant.”

The hostess visibly relaxes, and he knows he took the right tack.  “I’m very sorry, sir.  We can—add you at the end of the list for now, but I’m afraid the wait will probably be over an hour…”

“I—” he hears himself say.  Ed’s presence at his side feels like the pulsing of hot blood in an open wound; he looks like an _idiot_ ; what is he supposed to—?  “I suppose…” He risks turning to meet Ed’s eyes, and—blessedly—they’re absolutely free of judgment, although there’s an interesting sort of wryness in them.  “Do you mind waiting?  I’m sorry, I _swear_ I—”

“I believe you,” Ed says.  “It’s totally fine.”

Roy turns to the hostess, perhaps a bit more plaintively than he’d like.  “Would you be so kind as to tack us on?”

“Of course,” she says.  “Mustang, you said?”

They can’t even find seats in the waiting area; it’s far too crowded at this time on a Saturday.  An hour is probably a charitable estimate—from his stint maitre d’-ing when his mother turned her rich-toned cabaret into an awful kitschy pub, he’d put it at closer to two.

“I’m so sorry,” he manages as he and Ed step outside.  At least the fresh air is nice and cool on his miserable flush of unmitigated shame.  “This sort of thing doesn’t usually happen to me.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, and the wryness blossoms in full with the next grin.  “I can tell.  Happens to me all the fucking time, though—should’ve warned you.  It’s probably contagious.”

He’s just so—

Young and sad and bright and resolute and _staggeringly_ beautiful in the fading sunset’s light.

“If you’re trying to convince me to stay away from your saliva,” Roy says, “you’re going to have to do a whole lot better than that.”

Ed laughs.  It’s a sound like a church bell in a small town on a crisp morning as the fog clears over the hills—a sound like peace and picturesqueness and quiescence and absolution.  Roy’s never even lived in a small town, let alone one in some kind of over-saturated Ricola commercial valley, but in that _second_ —

God.

“I’ll work on it,” Ed says.  “Meantime, um—I mean, if you wanna wait, that’s no problem.  Really.  But if you’re hungry, I was… I mean, I was thinking—we’re, like, a quarter of a mile from the best burger place in three counties, if you want.  I mean, I know we’re not dressed for it, but—”

The rush of relief hits Roy faster than a drug—his brain is a test car smashing into a brick wall, and all the noise just… stops.

“I think that sounds like a spectacular idea,” he says.

Ed’s face lights up like the Eiffel Tower at night—a beacon in the dimness; an object of art.

Al needn’t have worried about intimidating him; Roy never stood a _chance_.

  


* * *

  


The burgers are, indeed, superlative, and the fries are better still.  Roy can’t even guilt himself about the salt and the grease; Ed’s wolfish grin will kill him long before they ever do.  If he’s nosediving right past the point of no return, he might as well go down in flames: he reaches out to give Ed one of the fries—and _Lord_ , he may just have met his match; Ed holds his gaze and nips it right out from between his fingertips, and the smile slants _wicked_ as he licks his lips.

“I really did wanna try that restaurant,” Ed says.  “It looked real nice and classy.  Like you.”

“Whereas this place is delicious and adorable,” Roy says, gesturing to the red-and-white-striped awnings and umbrella trying to drag them back to the fifties by force, “like you.”

Ed flushes hot again.  Roy’s still got it.

“It’ll still be there,” Roy says, easing up on the charm in favor of some earnest honesty, “if you’d like to go another time.”

Ed beams at him for a second, then reconsiders, gives him a smoldering look, and licks the length of another fry before putting it in his mouth.  The tip of his tongue darts out to catch the grains of salt left on his fingertips.

“Love to,” he says.

He then says, “ _Shitfuck_ ” and jumps up to start pounding on Roy’s back when it becomes apparent that Roy is choking on his drink.

  


* * *

  


“Hey, um,” Ed says as they turn into the labyrinth of suburban streets around Roy’s home.  “If I—shit.  Uh.  If I—acted like a huge moron—”

“What?” Roy asks.

“I feel like my face is broken,” Ed says.  “I’ve probably had a, like, wanna-know-how-I-got-these-scars Joker smile going all fucking night.  It _hurts_.  And I know I said all kinds of stupid shit.  But.  I mean.  The reason is that—it was really great.  And I—think you’re really cool.  So… yeah.  Um.  Winry’s always saying I should be more ‘direct’ about my feelings, so—my feeling was that this was awesome, and that’s why I was all fucking weird and shit, so I—hope you didn’t mind too much.  And if you ever… y’know, want to do something like this again, then… But if you don’t, that’s cool, too; Elysia’s awesome, and any time you n—”

“Ed,” Roy says.

Ed’s fingers are fidgeting endlessly with the cuffs of his sleeves.  “Yeah?”

“My feeling was that you were magnificent,” Roy says.  “Start to finish, unremittingly.  My feeling is that I am unworthy of the privilege of spending another dinner in your company, let alone several, but if they’re on offer, I am _certainly_ not too proud to take you up.  How’s next weekend for you?”

“Fantastic,” Ed says.  “Fucking great.”  He lays one hand over his eyes and starts to laugh, just a touch hysterically.  “You sure this is happening?”

“I will be indescribably disappointed if I wake up,” Roy says, and that’s every bit as true as the rest of it.

“’Kay,” Ed says.  “Just—no, I dunno, that’s weird.  Never mind.”

Roy makes sure his smile will be audible.  “No, what?”

“You think we could take Elysia with us next time?” Ed asks.  “I mean, Al’s the best, but she gets so sad when you’re gone.  Plus I dunno how often she gets to dress up like a princess and go out.  Is she into that?”

Roy manages to swallow the words that leap into his throat, which are _Oh, God, please marry me._

“That is perhaps the finest idea I’ve ever heard,” he says instead.

  


* * *

  


“Okay,” Ed mutters as they start up the cobblestone walk to the front door, “this part’s sorta weird.  The part with my brother being the babysitter while you and I are dating, I mean.  That thing.”

“I think it’s a nice extra layer of security,” Roy says.  “If I don’t invite you in, that gives him time to leave poison on the rims of all my drinking glasses.  And if I _do_ invite you in, I can’t suggest anything as untoward as I might like, because he’s got access to all my knives.”

“You’re sick,” Ed says, grinning.  “I had no idea.  It’s _awesome_.”

“I tone it down a little in front of Elysia,” Roy says.  He puts his keys in the lock and winks.  “Would you like to come in?”

Ed beams at him.  “Only if you’re sure I’m not putting your life at risk.”

“I’m also banking on the proximity of the cat having mellowed your brother out a bit,” Roy says, turning the key.  “I didn’t realize I had such a profound advantage there, or I would have leveraged it.”

Ed snorts—Roy can’t tell whether it’s at the prospect of him using pets to his benefit in the wearing down of the overprotective brother, or at the grandiose way he gestures as he holds the door, but it hardly matters—and then steps in.  “Our apartment complex won’t let us keep anything with fur.  Well.  Anything at _all_ ; we asked if we could get a turtle or a lizard or something, and they basically told us where to stick our terrarium.”

“I always hear the best parts of your conversations,” Al says from where he’s sitting perfectly upright on the couch, some novel Roy can’t quite make out spread in his hand.  He indicates the cat sprawled across his lap.  “Forgive me for not getting up.”

“Perfectly all right,” Roy says, surreptitiously scanning the room for evidence of destruction and/or nuclear meltdowns.  “How did it go?”

“About as effortlessly as humanly possible,” Al says.  “I’m not sure how you replaced that child with a baby angel, but kudos for managing it.”

Roy smiles and says “A magician never tells,” which is rather kinder than “Some days I truly think losing everything she had purified her somehow.”  He then says “Excuse me just a second” and scuds off to her bedroom to peek in.

A familiar little tuft of chestnut-brown hair protrudes over the comforter, and she’s clinging to her best teddy bear.  The lines of tension in her body when she sleeps worry him sometimes; she’s always curled up around something, defensively, like she’s warding off the demons in her dreams.

Very gently, he sets his hand down on her shoulder.  “Sweetheart.”

Her eyes flicker open, and she smiles at him sleepily.

“Just wanted to say goodnight, Princess,” he says.  “You have fun?”

“Yeah,” she mumbles.  “Al’s nice.”  She yawns cavernously.  “G’night, Uncle Roy.”

She sits up halfway to hug him, he kisses her forehead, and then she drops to the bed again.

When Roy steps back into the living room, Ed’s leaning over the back of the couch in order to reach down and stroke Jack’s ears while he talks quietly to Al, who’s set the book aside and dedicated his entire attention to his brother’s face.  They’re both engrossed in one another—and it’s the same sort of devoted interest that Ed gives to Elysia, and Roy dares to wonder…

Will he earn that, one of these days?  Possibly—is it too much to hope?—someday soon?  The honor of fixation from those bright gold, dancing eyes; the softness of his voice when he knows, he _trusts_ , that he’s being heard—

It’s been a long, long time since someone loved him unconditionally.  It’s far too early now even to contemplate, and yet…

And yet.

Ed glances up and grins at him, shyly; Al favors him with a not-overtly-negative appraising look.

“Can I get either of you something to drink?” Roy asks.

“Ed’s not allowed to have alcohol on dates,” Al says, and Ed’s face twists with betrayal.  “It makes him eas—”

“Shut _up_!” Ed cuts in.  “Don’t listen to him; he’s a jerk.”

“Excuse you,” Al says.

Ed sticks his tongue out.

That is not assuaging any of Roy’s somewhat-less-than-pristine-and-innocent thoughts.

“I’m fine,” Ed says after a moment, and his glower melts into a much softer gaze as it swings to Roy, and then he turns it back to his brother.  “How about you, Al?  You thirsty?”

“Not as much as you,” Al says brightly.

Ed looks like he’s going to start hurling Roy’s furniture through the windows in another second.

“I’m _kidding_ ,” Al says.  “Gosh, Brother; I know you have a sense of humor in there somewhere, under all the nerves.”

“He does,” Roy says, seizing the least dangerous thread of the conversation so far before it can slither out of reach.  “He’s very funny.”

Ed blinks at him like he’s started uttering incomplete sentences in Bulgarian.  “Since when?”

Roy pauses with _Since… always, presumably?_ inching towards the tip of his tongue and looks helplessly to Al.

“Get used to it,” Al says, not especially unkindly.  “He doesn’t think much of himself.”

“Well, that’s preposterous,” Roy says, meaning it.

Ed flushes.

“Okay,” Al says.  “We should probably go before someone bursts a blood vessel.”  Ed stares at him.  Al gestures to the flood of pink that has recently conquered his cheeks.  “You know.”  He hesitates for a long moment, and then he gestures to Roy—below the waist.  “You _know_.”

“Oh, my fucking _God_ , Al,” Ed says.  “If you wanted to fucking ruin this, you should’ve slashed the tires, or drawn on my face with Sharpie while I was sleeping, or secretly tailored my pants so they’d fall off in the middle of the restaurant, or—”

“That wouldn’t have ruined it,” Roy says.  “And don’t worry about it, because nothing has.”

Ed eyes him suspiciously.  This is the first time he’s ever received quite this kind of treatment for being _nice_ at the end of a date.

He thinks he loves it.  Ed is so flailingly defensive and wildly unpredictable at the best of times—it’s _insufferably_ cute.

“Okay,” Ed says slowly, like he’s baiting an animal with remarkably sharp teeth.  “Well—cool.”

“Very,” Al says.  Gently he lifts Jack—who, in the throes of the day’s dozenth naptime, lolls around like an extremely contented ragdoll and allows himself to be deposited on the next couch cushion—off of his lap.  “All right, Brother.  Give me your keys; I’ll… warm up the car.”

Ed blinks as Al stands, brushes cat fur off of his pants legs, and holds a hand out.  “Huh?”

“Just give them to me,” Al says.  “You know, why don’t you get a glass of water before you go after all?”

Ed continues to blink.  “I don’t…”

Al sends Roy a long-, long-, _long_ -suffering look.  “You could go say goodnight to Elysia.  Or at least look in on her.  Why don’t you do that?”

The bewilderment dominating Ed’s face doesn’t lift or fade or falter, but he stops blinking long enough to shrug—whether or not he’s seen through to the objective of his brother’s extraordinarily transparent machinations, Roy supposes, he trusts Al enough to go along with it, now that he can see the puppeteer’s hands above his head.  “O… kay.”  He looks to Roy, pushing his hands deep into his pockets and rocking back on his heels with half a smile—which is interesting, since it leaves Roy with half a heart; the other portion cleaves off and lands on the carpet at Ed’s feet.  “You mind?  I won’t wake her up.”

“By all means,” Roy says.

Ed drops his keys into Al’s expectant palm and slips off down the hall.  Al twirls the keys around his finger and raises his eyebrows at Roy.

“You owe me one,” he says.

“Duly noted,” Roy says.

“No tongue,” Al says.

Roy’s mouth drops open a bit, and what comes from it is: “I… what?”

“You heard me,” Al says, about as hard-eyed and terrifying as it’s possible for a twenty-year-old boy to be while wedging his feet into a pair of flip-flops and wiggling his toes.  At Roy’s appalled expression, he relents a touch.  “All right— _some_.  If you _must_.  Demonstrate some class.  If I have to hear about how the backs of your teeth taste tomorrow, things are going to get authentic.”

Roy’s brain doesn’t seem to be processing any of this.  “Do you—was that supposed to be a version of ‘shit’s going to get real’?”

Al sighs.  “You don’t have the _slightest_ idea how difficult it can be to make oneself understood without swearing.  Anyway—be nice.  He thinks a lot of you.”

Forsaking the search for brain cells, Roy rummages for his tongue.  “Well, I—think—quite a lot of—”

Al puts one hand on the door handle and holds the other up to silence him.  He smiles.

“You’d better,” he says.

The door shuts.

Roy…

Gives up on making sense of this.

It’s rather liberating, actually.

“Uh,” Ed’s voice says tentatively from behind him.  “You okay?”

Roy turns towards him, and it’s just so damned easy to _smile_ faced with those eyes.  “‘Okay’ would be a grievous understatement.”

Ed grins slowly.  “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Roy says, sauntering to meet him.  “Can I kiss you before you go?”

The bludgeoningly direct approach seems to be the most effective with Ed: this particular exhibition of it makes him blush to the roots of his hair, which is _agonizing_ in its sweetness.

“Oh,” Ed says.  “I, um.”  He clears his throat, squares his shoulders, and tosses his head, flipping his bangs out of his face before they slide into his eyes again.  “Sure.  I mean, if you want.”

“Never doubt that,” Roy says, grazing the tips of his fingers over Ed’s shoulder, up his neck, along his jaw—he shivers just _slightly_ and tilts his head up at the touch, and _that_ —

Roy hesitates to use the word _perfect_ lightly, because it’s normally a lie.

But Ed’s the single most honest thing he’s ever wanted for himself.

A kiss is just a kiss until it has significance—until it means more than the perfunctory physicality; until it ceases to be a meeting of mouths, a joining of lips, a push and pull of hands and tongues, a friction game of slickness and skin, and starts to be something… else.  Something more.  Something different.  An offering, a message, a plea—

 _Let me show you how good I can make you feel.  Let me read you all the wordless paeans; let me worship you in silence but for breathing and the whimper of surprise half-buried in your throat.  Let me prove to you that I’m so much more than willing; that this is so much more than_ business _; let me have the unrivaled joyous pleasure of teaching you how the best sort of desperation tastes—_

Ed draws back, gasping for air, and Roy’s ego would be puffing like a happy hedgehog if he wasn’t so concerned.

He swipes his thumb gently over the ridge of Ed’s cheekbone; let it not be rejection, not now, not so soon.  He’s not sure his limping heart could take a _Sorry, this went further than I thought; could we maybe—you know—not?_

“You all right?” he asks, and the act of prompting him for details on the edge of destruction is braver than Ed knows.

“Yeah,” Ed says, slightly faintly.  “Just… forgot to breathe for a second there.  Um, again.  Been a while since… y’know.”

“Since you made out for several minutes uninterrupted?” Roy asks.

Ed grins, shyly, and there’s still suspicion in it—still a fragment of defensiveness, like he expects all the gentle tendrils he puts out to be torn down; like he anticipates that he’ll be mocked for even trying.  Like he’s waiting for the other combat boot to fall and crush his hopes beneath one steel toe, and kick the dust out to the wind, and that will be the end of it.  Like it’s just safer not to want a thing.

“Well,” Ed manages, “yeah.  I mean—I’ve been—busy.”

“So have I,” Roy says.  “I think it’s been—just about two years.  More since anyone in the same category of excellence as you.”

There’s that gorgeous flush of shock and flattery again.  “Wh—holy shit, Roy.”

“I mean it,” Roy says.  This is his—the privilege; the possibility; it’s all quite literally at his fingertips, and he brushes one across Ed’s forehead, guiding back the silky curtain of his bangs.  “I mean all of it.”

It’s perilous to be so truthful, but something in him—something in his guts, in his bones, at the core—knows Ed won’t settle for any less.

And something in a softer place knows that Ed won’t take advantage.

…not his dick.  His heart.  For once.

Ed swallows, eyes huge and fixed on Roy’s face, and _God_ , the weight of his undivided attention makes Roy’s fucking _knees_ shake.  Ed’s gaze drops to the knot of Roy’s tie—or perhaps his throat—and then one of his clever hands darts up and fiddles with the tail, smoothing it out against his chest.

“Jesus,” he says.  “You’re like some kind of friggin’ fairy tale, you know that?”

“A rather dull one, I think,” Roy says.

Ed pauses in fussing with the tie long enough to glare at him.  “Where the hell’ve you been?”  He hesitates, tugs on the tie, and bites down on his bottom lip.

It is a _very_ good thing that the audible rumbling of the car engine reminds Roy that Al is pointedly burning petroleum outside; otherwise the temptation to jump Ed right now could overwhelm a man’s better judgment altogether.

“Thing is,” Ed says slowly, “I’ve never believed in fairy tales.”

“No?” Roy asks.  “Elysia’s going to be very disappointed to hear that.  She has her heart set on becoming an official crown princess and domesticating a dragon someday.”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “So what does that make you?”  He grins.  “The wise and noble king or some shit?”

Roy grimaces back.  “More like the hapless, bumbling regent, I think.”

Ed scowls at him.  “Like hell.  Maybe you’re, like, the sexy archduke advisor or something.”  He pauses.  “What the hell does that make _me_?”

“A knight,” Roy says.  “Her champion, I believe.”

Ed flushes again.  He is without a doubt the cutest person Roy has ever had the improbable good fortune of meeting, let alone _dating_.

“Do I have to fight in tournaments?” Ed asks.  “Other than carousels, I’m actually kinda bad with horses.  They’re okay and all, just that they’re—y’know.”

“Unreasonably high off the ground?” Roy hazards.

The look Ed gives him combines all the best parts of both a sour expression and a reluctant smile.  “Well—yeah.”

“I’m sure you could be her champion on foot,” Roy says.  He pauses to make sure there’s time for Ed to think him merciful.  “Or on a pony.”

“Oh, get _out_ ,” Ed says, but the grin he’s fighting comes through in a flicker of teeth and the curl at the edge of his beautiful, beautiful lips.  He prods Roy in the chest with one finger to punctuate the point.  “But, um—you wanna—movies next weekend, maybe?  With Elysia?”

“Yes,” Roy says, and the word’s too small.  “Very much.  So much that I really shouldn’t tell you; I don’t want to spook you on the _first_ date.”

Ed tilts the grin at him—full this time, unreserved, and practically destructive.  “Eh.  I don’t scare easy.  All right, I’ll—text you.”

“Please,” Roy says, and that one hardly skims the meaning either.

They spend another second just gazing at each other in wordless rapture, and then Ed shakes himself awake and starts purposefully for the door.  “Guess I shouldn’t keep Al waiting.”

“I suppose not,” Roy says.  They have quite a lot to thank Al for, all things considered.  When Ed pauses with one hand on the doorknob, though, Roy reaches out slides two fingers through the trailing end of the silken ponytail again.  “I’ll talk to you soon, then?”

Ed beams at him—and _that_ word’s never been truer: bright like the silver of the moon; warm like a strip of sunlight spearing through the clouds.  “Yeah.”

Roy is just a man—just a perplexed and perplexing collection of wispy thoughts and hazy recollections; just a pile of objects and remembrances slotted into a timeline, knitted onto bones and flesh and something like a psyche.  He’s just a man, and he’s lonely, and he’s weak; and Ed would surely argue that he himself is nothing more or less, but right now he’s so stunning Roy can barely breathe.

Is it criminal, then, to lean in for another kiss to sustain himself until they meet again?

Or is it only human?

“Wait,” Ed says, and there’s a finger on his lips, and he’s frozen with his eyes half-shut and must look like a monumental _idiot_ , except—

That Ed’s just grinning harder now.

“What’s Al?” Ed asks.  “In the fairy tale.  I can’t leave him out.”

Roy blinks.  He draws back a quarter of an inch so that his breath will shift softly against Ed’s fingertip, and then he thinks it over—if there’s one thing about this that he’s sure of by now, it’s that Ed’s not the sort you blow off.

The sort you _blow_ , maybe; there’s a thought—

Lord, he’s lost.

“It doesn’t quite fit to cast him as your squire,” he says.  “Perhaps your—bard?”

Ed starts to laugh, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up, and he is just—he is so far beyond the realm of the real—

“Going around singing my exploits?” he asks.  “Wearin’ those two-color pants?  Oh, man, I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

“Please don’t,” Roy says.  “I can think of much better ways to die.”

Ed snickers.  “Yeah, you’d get a mandolin broken over your head at the very friggin’ least.  And I like your head how it is, so—right.”

“He can be your wizard best friend,” Roy says.  “He accompanies you on all of your journeys and helps you best the magical enemies as well as the mundane.”

Ed’s eyes light up.  Roy would conquer _real_ armies for that.

“You ever considered quitting the whole poli-sci thing and writing instead?” Ed asks.

“Yes,” Roy says.  “Unfortunately, I’m absolutely putrid.”

Ed scoffs.  “Yeah, right.”  He notices his hand still held up in the air between them, index finger outstretched, and drops it.  He blushes again.  Roy discovers that it is possible to swoon inwardly.  “Um… right.  Um.  If you wanna…” He gestures, vaguely, in a manner that seems to mean _Pick up where we left off_.

“I’d be delighted,” Roy says—and then he proves it.

Ed’s hands lift again, pause, and then curl into the front of Roy’s shirt, and holy _hell_ , that’s hot; their mouths line up so damn flawlessly it’s honestly a wonder there are no magnets involved.  Ed tastes quite distinctly of the lava cake he obliterated at dessert; he makes a soft sound like a whimper and a murmur mixed—breathy, but from the middle of his chest, and tremulous like the start of a sigh.  Roy can’t keep his fingertips from delving into that beautiful hair, from dragging down over Ed’s collarbones, from skimming along his shoulders and his arms—he just wants to touch him; just wants to _know_ he’s here—because this shouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be happening; this is so much more than he’s ever deserved, in any lifetime, any world—

He draws back, and Ed pants a bit, and that is entirely unfair.  Roy brushes the gold bangs back out of his eyes again and grins a little wider.

“I should let you go,” he says.  “Al’s going to want to have a word with me as it is.”

Ed winks broadly.  “S’long as all he gets is words, ’cause you’re saving the rest for me.”

Roy is speechless.

It is an exquisite novelty.

Ed laughs, a shade nervously, and then fumbles for the doorknob again.  “Shit, I’m so unfunny it’s not even funny.  Obviously.  Shit.”

“You’re perfect,” Roy says again, before he can stop himself.

Ed blushes.

Roy touches his cheek.  “I mean it,” he says.

“’Kay,” Ed gets out.  “Um—g’night.  Roy.  G’night, Roy.  You’re—well.  You know.”

“Goodnight,” Roy says.

Ed bites his lip, bests the door, and slips out into the night.

And the word’s never been truer, has it?  A good damn night it is.


End file.
